Sunday's on the Phone to Monday (24 page)

Would you like to leave for lunch? I checked you out for two hours.
Sawyer said such nice things.

I guess?
asked Jane. Her cheeks smoldered an inflammatory brick.

I know a good place nearby. Do you like croissants?

Who doesn't like croissants? All buttery and crusty,
said Jane. She sounded like she could have a lot of conversations about casual subjects.

Jane put on her jacket and her shoes. They walked to the parking lot. Sawyer opened the doors to his bisque-tinted M3, and Jane slid into the passenger's seat.
Hot car,
she said, clicking her seat belt in place. Sawyer drove about ten minutes. The radio played the Four Seasons, “Walk Like a Man.” He stopped in front of a coffee shop called Lulu's. Next to it was a day care center. They could see toddlers through the windows, playing with blocks and paints. Jane had never seen so many babies in her entire life.

It's a great place,
said Sawyer.
We can come here again, if you like it.

Nobody knows we are here,
said Jane.

So?
asked Sawyer.

He knew she wouldn't try to do anything like kiss him, because Jane was afraid. She would let anybody do whatever the hell they wanted with her body, but no way would she try to get something she actually wanted, even from the man who married her. That was why holding her hand was okay: this Heartrending security. Deferential Jane, whose vicious tendencies only veered (by the first degree) inward, didn't expect anything from Sawyer, for those with no self-worth don't expect anything from anybody.

Still, it was somehow true that Sawyer really loved this woman, but in a way no man he knew loved his wife, even the closeted gay men who still managed to have sex and best friendships with their wives. His connubial love was retired, safe. He compared it to the
god moment
he imagined surgeons experienced during surgery. A filial love, a kind of love for a baby.

Two pain au chocolats, please,
Sawyer ordered for the both of them. Jane felt charmed by Sawyer's display of control.
Do you want anything else?

He still hadn't let go of her hand. -
My companion, -
Jane thought. She said, o
ne orange juice and one pineapple juice,
distending her arms like a yogi or stretching cat.
I get really thirsty.

I do too,
said Sawyer.
Make that four.

What could they talk about? He scrutinized Jane's hair, chin, collarbones. Was she sexy? Could she be? He'd never thought of it before. As he studied his ex-wife he wondered what was afflicting him, not a falling in love but a changing of outlook. Her blues bathed, diluted in the room. Her excruciating sincerity. Her damage. The endless, simple equation of time that she had for him. He felt a glimmer of something that was not pity.

I made a friend yesterday.

Jane, that's extraordinary! Who?
asked Sawyer, expecting to hear all about another invalid with a fugue for a life.

Our niece. Lucy.

Okay,
said Sawyer. She was slipping back into her mirages, poor girl.

She told me she's sick,
said Jane,
too
.
That she needed surgery.

Wait, what?
Where was Jane getting this information? Wasn't it another secret they were supposed to keep from her?

For her Heart.

So Claudio told you?

Claudio told me nothing. Lucy did. A couple of days ago,
said Jane.
I didn't know what to tell her. Everything she or I said. It was all awful.

Sawyer swallowed his buttery mouthful, wondering why in the world Claudio would ever tell his sister about Lucy. The more knowledge Jane had, the more she'd disfigure it, have her way with it.

Maybe for our next visit,
said his former wife,
you and I can visit Lucy in the hospital. The other kind.

Maybe,
said Sawyer. For a while, neither Sawyer nor Jane said a word. Sawyer didn't know if it was a
together
kind of silence or the clumsy kind.

What were you thinking, leaving me alone?
Jane spoke with a drowning look on her face. She pushed her hands into her knees and looked deep into their pink pores, like she was trying to find a little god in herself.

I don't know, Jane,
said Sawyer. His Heart buoyed.

We could've taken care of each other.

Sawyer thought about Claudio and for a moment hated him. He'd pressured Sawyer to take vows with this woman. They'd made a mockery of marriage. Jane was his partner in crime, and she didn't even know she was a criminal.

It seemed like they had all the right things for you in the hospital.

Jane gave a humid and insulted look.
The medicine helps,
she said.
Not all the time. But I could be a lot worse.

I know, sweetie pie,
said Sawyer.

I know a man who can't even speak,
said Jane.
He drools. They have to wipe up his shit.

That must be terrible, to have nobody know what you're thinking.

Sawyer thought about Noah. What was he doing now? Likely reading his e-mail or eating. Maybe he was on the subway. Dear Noah. The love of his life.

The waiter came by and asked if they needed anything else. Sawyer said,
that will be all, thanks,
smiling his faux-smile: enticing, incredibly stylized. Nearly mocking, like he was amused to be alive.

Maybe when I get better,
hoped Jane,
you'll come pick me up, and then we'll pick out a house? And maybe have a kid?

Maybe, Jane,
said Sawyer.
Maybe.
He found her revelations attractive and wondered if she herself believed them, even at her maddest. They were shiny and flat, like magazine cover girls, more airbrushed than alive. He wanted to tell her something true and appalling for once, sick of lying to her, even if it was for everyone's own good. But instead he kept his mouth shut and drove her home.

When Sawyer walked Jane back to her room, she'd already reverted back to her passive self.
Maybe I'll see you soon?
she asked.

Definitely, Jane, yes,
hustled Sawyer.
But I'm really busy this week. I have work.

Everyone is always doing work,
said Jane.

I'm sorry, Jane,
said Sawyer.
I really am.
He looked for a moment at Jane's bed, which she'd share with nobody. The bed was unmade, and he could see the dent of last night's body, a Jane-shaped dimple. He walked away, looking forward.

Jane, making no sound, walked into the room where she'd spend the rest of her weary life. Thinking about the entire happy day, now that she was home, made her blue. She shoved the light on and hung up her jacket. She liked feeling her pulsing in the hand he'd held. She made her way to the bed and to the curtains, to her dresser and the picture frame and back
to her bed. She touched everything her husband had touched. She picked up the picture frame, remembering how he'd bowed his handsome fingers around it. His fingers: gentle, like mini-cigars. With zigzaggy, zooty strokes on his palm. She kissed the frame. She tried to press it to her soul, but she didn't know where her soul was.

C
laudio received a telephone call from a doctor at Lincoln Mental Hospital, who'd transferred Jane to the emergency room at Good Samaritan Hospital. Jane needed a blood transfusion—twenty minutes prior, she'd slit her wrists with the soft golf pencil her hospital had allotted her. She'd been bleeding to death for only ten minutes before a nurse found her in her bathroom
. Cutting an artery with a pencil is nearly impossible,
the doctor told Claudio, sounding like he had some strategical power in his knowledge but only to a degree, like a broker explaining the stock market after a queasy, unanticipated plunge.
You'd have to try really hard.

I see,
said Claudio, and he tried to cry, pressing his palms into his heavy eyes. But it had been so long.

The more the doctor talked, the more Claudio spaced out. His sister, dying the same deranged way she had lived. If she was to spend her whole life being punished, Claudio would too. They were like identical twins in that way.
Holy,
he whispered, having no energy to say
shit
(the young brother in him would've) or
moly
(the father in him would've) or anything.

L
ucy's beeper erupted in sound.
- What in the world? -
Lucy woke rubbing her eyes, irritatingly locating the source of such noise. There it lay, there was the clatter it made—her salient beeper, epileptic on the floor. The instant felt like her birthday and the night before Christmas and she was in love, all at once. And softer—the disconnecting fizz of guilt in her ears. Somebody was in a hospital right now, being declared brain-dead. In the grand scheme of things, the luck that would save Lucy's life was nothing more than a frail silver lining. When she started this conversation on the way to Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center, Natasha interrupted.
Don't think about that. Focus on the good vibrations.

Lucy felt herself sweat in the dark.
It's sad he or she died,
she added.

A
nother name for a Heart donor when (s)he's brain-dead is a
beating Heart cadaver.

The cardiologist had warned Lucy long ago that sometimes the donor's Heart may be deemed unsuitable. Lucy waited to hear the bad news, wanting to assume the worst. That way, what she heard would either be good news or something she already knew.

A string of hours passed, thumping rain and dead leaves visible through the window. After the cornflower-into-marigold sunrise, this Heart was reckoned proper for Lucy, this Heart from Oxford, Mississippi. This southern Heart was all they knew. Hospitals had rules to respect its donors' privacy. Just as well, for Lucy had nothing in her that could find out any more information about the body. -
A body
, - she thought. Nothing could be worse than calling the body a person.

They waited and waited for the new, sad Heart to ship south to north. Lucy knew that it probably wasn't a good idea to name it, just like how she shouldn't have named her old Heart, but she did anyway. She named it Dirty Martini, since she'd always wanted to try one (imagining it bitter in a sparkly way), always felt the tense desire to be an adult. But maybe it was even a worse idea to name her Heart something with the word
dirty
in it. So she renamed it Kitten. Kitten, the alive, southern Heart from Oxford, Mississippi.

T
he paramedics and doctor-specialists and nurses rushed Lucy to the emergency room, ready to take out Face and sew in Kitten. They'd done transplants before, which was so bizarre for Lucy, who felt the same empty she felt in the past flipping through a stack of scenic vacation pictures with no people. This was her life. For the professionals, it was one day's work. Everything was platitude with high-stakes jobs. Lucy's old Heart palpitated, one of the last times Face would be doing this. Face!

Trust and communication levels between doctors and patients weren't just reassuring, they were essential. Consent, or lack thereof, was a way of utilizing language to feel the effects of an action, whether that action was wanted or not. Lucy could feel the pressure from the surgeon when he asked her,
are you ready?
Would she ever be? The anesthesia evanesced, made her vanishing and susceptible. The surgeon told Lucy he was only there to help.

S
aying good-bye wasn't Natasha's forte. Her family hugged and kissed her sister. Natasha latched her cheek to Lucy's cold hamlet of mouth, and instead told her she'd see her soon.

I don't want to go to sleep,
said Lucy.
I'm scared. Please.

I'll see you soon,
repeated Natasha, reductive. -
Is there a better way of saying good-bye? -
she speculated, after Lucy was wheeled out of the room.

See you later.
In a torpor.

See you later, alligator.

See you when I see you.

See you later—never good-bye. It was always, see you later.

T
he year before, Carly and Lucy helped Natasha study vocabulary for the SATs, and every day Carly picked a new favorite word. One,
onomatopoeia
(how Carly loved that downy, near-negative letter
O
!), classified words that were technically also the sounds they made. Words like
crunch, pop, boing, buzz, wham!

There had to be storms of sound on Lucy's operating table.
Thump, thump, thump.
The sound of a beating Heart.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The sound of the cardiac monitor when the person's Heart was working.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.
The sound of the cardiac monitor when the person's life came to a shuddering stop.

In movies, surgeons kept their speech simple.
Scalpel,
they'd say, and the nurse would get the surgeon the scalpel. Regarding life-and-death situations, Carly guessed that there wasn't enough time to dillydally. You had to make politics of words, preserve each one and keep pace, hold on to its utmost importance. So while her sister was getting her Heart replaced, Carly didn't marvel much about words. She wondered instead about sounds.